Eur. Phys. J. D (2016) 70: 34
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2016-60701-1

Regular Article

Elastic cross sections for low-energy electron collisions with tetrahydropyran^*

Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal do Paraná, Caixa Postal 19044, 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil

^a e-mail: bettega@fisica.ufpr.br

Received: 10 December 2015
Received in final form: 5 January 2016
Published online: 11 February 2016

Abstract

We report on calculated elastic cross sections for low-energy electron collisions with the cyclic ether tetrahydropyran (C₅H₁₀O). The calculations were carried out with the Schwinger multichannel method implemented with norm-conserving pseudopotentials in the static-exchange-polarization approximation for energies up to 20 eV. Our cross sections are compared with previous results obtained for cyclohexane and 1,4-dioxane, since the three molecules present similar structures. The calculated differential cross sections for these three molecules present similarities, except at low scattering angles, where the differential cross sections of tetrahydropyran present a sharp increase due to the permanent dipole moment of the molecule. The similarities observed in the cross sections reveal that the molecular geometry plays an important role in the description of scattering process. We also compared our calculated elastic integral cross section for tetrahydropyran with experimental total cross sections data available in the literature and found a good qualitative agreement between both results.